Yeah like the Republicans thought they built their businesses all by themselves. They conveniently forgot all about the social system that built the roads, schools, governments, etc. that made their business opportunities possible and trained their workers how to read and write. No human does anything alone, and no species does either. We are all a part of the great web of existence. A "god" ( context ) that was never anywhere but here does not need to be waited for. What we have to wait for is the realization of that fact. For some reason it is deceptively unobvious.

@skado Sole proprietorships ARE mostly the result of individual, not collaborative efforts.

@Alienbeing
……….

@skado Not over my head at all. You don't have that ability.

@Alienbeing
I bet nobody in the world has that ability. Am I right?

@skado No, as usual you are wrong.

@Alienbeing
I bet you’re actually a humanbeing. Am I wrong about that?

@skado What is wrong? You are encouraging an illegal activity, unless we are both in Las Vegas.

Try harder.

@Alienbeing
What activity is that?

@skado Betting. Apparently you are not fmiliar with U,S, laws. Not surprising.

@Alienbeing
I see. It was a way of avoiding answering the question.
“Bet” is used as a figure of speech there, for those not familiar with the English language. And since atheists have difficulty with figurative forms, I’ll supply references:

4. To maintain confidently, as if making a bet: I bet they were surprised by the news.

[ahdictionary.com]

So, to be clear, it’s not a literal bet I’m making, but a figurative one, which, I’m quite confident isn’t against any law anywhere.

Following your suggestion and trying harder…

I maintain confidently that you are a human being. Is my confidence misplaced?

@skado Your laughable word salad is noted. thanks for the humor.

@Alienbeing
Well laughing is better than crying. Looks like progress to me. I’m convinced you’re 100% human.

@skado Will you certify that to my wife?

Like Sickle Cell Anemia...?

No, every culture has some form of sweets, and there is nothing adaptive about diabetes. Human culture simply has not been going long enough to be truly adaptive in every way.

"Great spans of time. " Is a ludicrous statement when talking about human culture, which has at best had only perhaps the trivial time of ten thousand years, at most, and only then in a tiny minority of geographic regions, to adapt to the great environmental changes that the agricultural revolution and the mismatch brought. Many features of human life are maladaptive, evolution even the relatively fast moving cultural evolution, does not have foresight.

@racocn8
Not sickle cell “anemia”. Sickle cell “trait” provides protection against malaria and usually has no ill effects for most people. It’s when both parents have the trait that their offspring can have the anemia.

But that’s entirely biological evolution, and here we’re talking bio-cultural evolution, with the greater emphasis on the cultural, which is more susceptible to deliberate human modification.

@skado

Gotta love adaptive behavioural strategies.

@Polemicist

A whole lotta strategizin' goin' on!

@Fernapple

In our ancestral environment it was adaptive to crave sweets because sugar, a vital nutrient, was relatively hard to obtain. In modern civilization, sugar is everywhere but we still have the genetic craving, so we overindulge. So diabetes is one of the many mismatch diseases.

What has been going long enough to be adaptive is our capacity for culture, and that capacity’s malleability. And nothing is “truly adaptive in every way.” Not bones, not muscles, not brains - nothing. Evolution doesn’t deal in perfections. A random mutation works well enough to enhance survival and reproduction, or it doesn’t. If it does, it gets reproduced - no waiting around for perfection.

Culture is defined in many different ways, but the element that tends to appear in most definitions is… behavior that is learned from previous generations. That is… not solely genetically programmed, nor solely invented by an individual, but collectively learned by a “society” and passed from generation to generation.

Of course the word “great” is a relative term, and “great spans of time” in the cultural realm are nowhere near as long as great spans in the biological realm. But collective generational wisdom has been valued and inherited by human offspring certainly for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens, some two to three hundred thousand years. It’s currently observable in chimpanzees, so it’s likely to have been going on at least since we diverged from them 7 to 12 million years ago. The cultural shift from nomadic to sedentary life is what happened ten thousand years ago - not the origination of human culture.

The whole evolutionary "point" of culture is its rapid, but not too rapid, malleability. Before the agricultural revolution, the behavior we call religion was little more than animism, but it had been around as a part of hunter/gatherer culture for at least many tens of thousands of years. The thing we call organized religion came in with, or shortly after, the invention of agriculture, and clearly functioned as a counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch inherent in the civilizing of an ape species.

This is a case of a biologically evolved, malleable behavioral trait morphing to meet the changing needs it evolved to meet. That need, among other things, is countering the potentially maladaptive effects of evolutionary mismatch.

Otherwise, maladaptive traits are taken out of the gene pool, sometimes as quickly as the lifetime of a single individual, and sometimes over many generations, but there is stiff evolutionary pressure against their replication.

Biological evolution has no foresight. Cultural evolution travels through the human mind, and therefore has some limited capacity for foresight. Even so, change is slow, because, dumbasses. OOPS! I meant Republicans. OOPS! I meant our dear conservative brothers and sisters who help us guard against runaway innovation.

[janegoodall.ca]

.

@skado

Dire traits.

@Polemicist
I love Dire Traits. Wish I could listen.

@skado

@skado I am aware of all of that, and I can not see how any of it has anything to do with my comment. If you wish to take part in an intelligent debate with others then you really do need to pay attention, and read what is written, not respond to your fanciful imagining of what may have been written.

My comment was first of all not about diabetes, though I know that I have used that metaphorically in the past and that could mislead. My sentence began with. "Every culture has a form of sweets," and the statement was not about the mismatch between human nature, and the post agricultural world causing diabetes, but rather about cultures inability to correct that, even after several thousand years, and indeed about culture making it worse. And it is still getting worse in many places. In other words, where is your ancient myth, telling us that the sugar lump is unclean ?

Your comments about chimpanzees and the fact that culture emerged before the agricultural revolution, are totally irrelevant as well. Again, did you not read my comment, which includes "to adapt to the great environmental changes that the agricultural revolution" and understand that my comment was specifically about post agricultural cultures. Or do you think that I am so dim, as to be unaware that some cultures may have elements reaching back to before the agricultural revolution, and indeed that there are still preagricultural cultures extent today. Do you really think that I am living of grid in an underground bunker ? Or is it, as I suspect, that strawmanning and other low standards are so commonplace in the world of religious cults, to which you are sentimentally attached, that you do it unthinkingly as a norm.

Certainly. Culture maybe defined in many different ways, and an element that tends to appear in most definitions should certainly be. "behavior that is learned from previous generations." But that is not by any means all of a good definition, nor even if we want a good definition the most important part of it. Since at the very least that would make a definition self contradicting with terms such as, "modern culture" "youth culture" and "cultural innovation" all of which, and others similar, are part of widespread usage.

If you do not wish to side with. "our dear conservative brothers and sisters who help us guard against runaway innovation." Then why support the ultra conservative idea of myth, as only that of, myth from the early post agricultural era, when it had had little time to evolve and receive any intelligent input relevant to the new situation. Especially those myths derived from theist religion, which is one of their main props ? When there are good modern myths, such as "enlightenment" dating from the Renaissance, "Universal suffrage" nineteenth century , and "human rights" twentieth century, for example, available instead. It is in fact a contradiction, to claim that there are benefits to cultural evolution, and yet want respect for cultural conservatism in its most extreme form.

( And just to head of the strawmanning that I know will follow this. Please note the word "theist" in the last paragraph, since it will be tedious to have to address yet another strawmanning about the meaning of the word religion. And also that the words "cultural conservatism" were qualified by the words, "most extreme form." )

@Fernapple
Of course you are, Fern. Of course you are.

@skado Read it.

A trait that is adaptive (provides an advantage for survival and reproduction) may only be beneficial in a certain environmental context. A slight change in that environment might turn what was once a boon into a bust. And change is inevitable. Hence the long list of extinct species. Considering the high rate of climate science denial among the devout, religious chauvinism and consequent war, religious resistance to birth control and overpopulation, etc., if organized religion was ever adaptive, it probably has outlived its usefulness.

@Flyingsaucesir

Exactly.

Hence the immeasurable value of any behavioral capacity that can mitigate that hazard.

@skado You mean like a capacity for free thinking, breaking free of the accepted norms? Then it becomes a question of numbers. Do enough people start thinking straight to save the species from itself? So far, it's not looking good.

PS I think you might have replied before I was finished editing my comment (I rarely get it right on the first go ).

@Flyingsaucesir
I did indeed reply before your edit, but it doesn’t necessitate a retraction of my reply.
I can add this:

Just as our genetic capacity for language does not determine which language we speak, or whether we speak it with a New York clip or an Alabama drawl, our genetic capacity for culture/religion has no truck with how we design or practice our religions.

In our deep history and prehistory, we have continuously amended our religious obsolescence to meet the current needs of time and place. What looked like religion six thousand years ago on the other side of the globe may bear little resemblance to what we think of as religion here on Main Street today.

Indeed, we may be hard pressed to find any doctrinal or behavioral similarities at all.

So what makes those two behaviors “religious”? What makes both a theistic and a non-theistic religion religious? What makes a religion of war and a religion of peace both religious? What makes a well practiced religion and a poorly practiced religion both identifiable as religions?

1. They bind a community together, under a single identity, as a coordinated workforce for common goals (survival).
2. They provide pressure-relief valves for conflicted personal psychology (forgiveness, atonement, nirvana, whatev).
3. They specify moral standards (not create them - describe and standardize them).
4. They propose a cosmology (cosmogenesis from the primordial tortoise egg, or big bang, doesn't matter).
5. They modify instinctual impulses in order to counter evolutionary mismatch (overlapping with moral instruction but including legal, practical, etc.).

Evolution cares not one whit whether the cosmology is modern or ancient, so long as at least these five functions are present. If they are, the group's fertility rate rises compared to competing groups in which these five functions are less well served.

This is natural selection.

This is science.

None of this precludes a cosmology based entirely on the most current and well-established scientific principles. As mentioned, for evolution's purposes, accuracy isn't an issue, one way or the other. But objective accuracy strikes me as the only "mythology" on the horizon that has the potential to unify a global society.

If you start with a modern cosmology, and find any means whatsoever to reliably supply the other four functions, you will have created a biologically authentic religion, by any modern anthropological standard.

If rising floodwaters threaten to overflow your seawall, you don't say, "Well I guess we don't need seawalls anymore." And you don't start a new seawall from the bottom up. You make the one you've got higher.

If a scientifically synthesized religion contained the necessary functions, not only would it work as an authentic standalone religion, it would necessarily mesh seamlessly with any natural religion as a "plugin" update. If designed in accordance with evidence, it would unify all major world religions with science. No new seawall necessary. No scientific compromise required.

If increased fertility is no longer in our best interest, the goal can be shifted to survival plus replacement, or dispersing in the universe, or cosmic bliss. But we work best toward any goal when we work as a coordinated team of reasonably stable individuals.

Results for claims that these functions are now adequately served by secular services are not in evidence. Not that they might not possibly be someday - they just aren't now. A history of religious communes and intentional communities outlasting secular ones by factors of ten or more suggests we shouldn't hold our breath.

There's no guarantee that any plan would be successful against impending extinction, but a scientifically informed one would surely be a better bet than the absence of any cohesive plan at all.

Call it religion, call it psychosocial behavior modification practice, call it scientific utopianism - names don't matter. Those functions have a proven track record favoring survival, and are as malleable in expression as our capacity for language or art, or indeed, science. It’s all culture. It need not be at war with itself.